About 200,000 homes and businesses which were classed as "ready to connect" in November 2017 by the NBN Co, the company rolling out Australia's national broadband network, have gone missing from this category of dwellings according to the company's own figures.
This is apparent from figures for February issued by NBN Co, wherein the number of dwellings ready to connect is listed as 6.5 million in November 2017 and 6.3 million in February.
The presumption is that these properties have gone missing because they are all due to be connected through HFC.
In November last year, NBN Co said that network issues affecting the HFC network had led to a suspension of HFC connections and that they would be delayed by anything from six to nine months.
{loadposition sam08}The discrepancy was noticed by Greg Bader, chief executive of the WA-based rental company, rent.com.au.
He told iTWire that he found it odd that NBN Co had not drilled down to the level of the state as far as these numbers were concerned.
Bader's company lists about 70,000 properties at any one time and provides details about every property's NBN connectivity as a guide for prospective tenants.
He said he had looked at properties he had seen over the three months of this year, a sample of about 146,000 in all states. Losing about 9000, or 6%, due to poor data matching left about 137,000 to analyse.
Analysing data for these premises, Bader came up with the following tables:
According to his extrapolated figures, the state most badly hit by the HFC issues is South Australia, which shows a -7% fall in dwellings ready for connections. Victoria is close behind with -6% while Queensland is at -4% and NSW at -3%.
Contacted for comment, an NBN Co spokesman told iTWire, "Yes. If you look at the drop from 7 December 2017 to 14 December 2017, you will see a drop of over half a million on this metric.
"We were very upfront about this in November last year. This is a consequence of us doing the necessary optimisation works on the HFC network to prioritise customer experience."
Pointing to this link, the spokesman added: "But note the steady increase since 14 December. We are getting the job done."